re: Are you a nationalist?

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For clarity...how do you see these as being distinct?

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I'm not the OP, but I can answer this question.

As I've illustrated earlier, notions of nationalism after Westphalia were tied specifically to the notion that the polity should be based around a group of people who shared the same ethnicity, language, culture, and religion. This group should also have the ability to self-determine. Self-determination became the basis of what is called Westphalian sovereignty, which says that groups of people should decide for themselves how they should be governed. This is in stark contrast to the imperial system, which was centralized only to the bare minimum, which led to uneven growth and economic opportunities. This notion that developed after 1648 is ethnic nationalism, and it was the prime driver behind much of European politics, and eventually politics elsewhere.

The suggestion that nationalism is a synonym for pride in one's homeland is ahistorical, as one can have pride in one's homeland (the classic example of this is Horace's Ode, Dulce et decorum est, which exemplified, perhaps ironically, the belief that it was good to die for the fatherland) without wanting that homeland to be organized by the same religion, language, culture, or ethnicity, as European imperial polities, as with empires everywhere, were not organized along those lines. Thus we can delineate distinct origins for the terms. The key difference is that nationalism, in its historical usage, often referred to movements that wanted a nation but did not have one.

This is a key point to make, as the development of what is called civic nationalism, the belief in the institutions of a nation, was a post-national development, as in it developed after the nation was formed. Thus it isn't based on the characteristics of ethnic nationalism, but rather pride in institutions and documents rather than a single unified national identity, which the US never had. This is also called constitutional patriotism, with much written about it, with the US and Switzerland being two prime examples.